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Seeking Sydney is a podcast that travels to the landscapes and landmarks of Sydney, adding the people and their stories. I will publish one episode every month for ten months. Episode 5 is now available in your podcast subscription, on the Spineless Wonders website, in Apple podcasts or Spotify or iHeart!
This episode starts at Carriageworks, a building that was once part of the Eveleigh Railway Workshops. I was drawn to this important part of our working history by a chance meeting with Lucy Taksa. She’s done an enormous amount of research on Eveleigh, and you can find a list of her articles in the Sources section of the Eveleigh Stories website, a wonderful, layered collection of material about the site and its workers. She touches on the Great Strike of 1917, which started at Eveleigh. If you want to read more about that, this is a good place to start. And this is the Labour Heritage Register that she was instrumental in setting up.
The story of Eveleigh is a story of work and a story of labour history. Through their unions its workers fought for improved conditions and pay but also for social justice issues. It was a place of high employment for Aboriginal people, and this is reflected in the support for Aboriginal rights, including protesting against the gaoling of Albert Namatjira in 1958. You can read more about him here and here.
The railway workers weren’t the only unionists who took action for social justice issues. Wendy Bacon describes the breadth of actions taken by the BLF, the Builders Labourers’ Federation, and then we look at the time when Frank Sinatra was told to walk on water. It’s sort of hilarious and sort of an object lesson in how the unions were willing to, and able to, use the power of their labour.
John Richardson describes how the nature of work changed through the 1980s and ‘90s. The shape of Sydney, and of unions, changed with it. The Hungry Mile is a good example of that. Once a place of backbreaking work (literally), of fierce battles for a job and lockouts it is now the city edge of the Barangaroo development, with its sleek canyons of polish and glass. But the Hungry Mile is not quite forgotten. It’s a name that’s given rise to songs and poems, a play, and a documentary.
In the 1960s and ‘70s, the unions weren’t the only groups in Sydney who were fighting for a different world order. There were people fighting for gay rights, Indigenous rights, women’s rights, and Glebe Point Road became a hub for those activities.
CAMP Inc – Campaign against Moral Persecution – a focus for gay and lesbian activity – was at 33a Glebe Point Road. It was an important place for Diane Minnis. She had come to Sydney in 1973 to attend a lesbian conference. The next day she went to a gay pride demo and was arrested. She got off ‘the usual charges of assaulting police, resisting arrest and some sort of unseemly words, you know, sort of language type of thing’ because the magistrate allowed that there was reasonable doubt. Amazingly, she had ‘a newspaper photograph of me being arrested by uniformed police, not the plainclothes detectives who swore that they arrested me.’ She also had pro bono legal representation from the Redfern Legal Centre.
Women’s House was at 67 Glebe Point Road and I spoke to Diane, Wendy Bacon and Julie Gibson about the women’s movement and the general feeling of change in the air. I highly recommend watching Brazen Hussies, if you haven’t already done so.
I couldn’t resist including a short clip from my favourite feminist band from the time – the Stray Dags: Tina Harris (vocals/guitar), Chris Burke (drums), Celeste Howden (bass), Mystery Carnage (vocals/percussion) Ludo McFerran (sax). More on them here, and the whole of Self Attack is here.
The beginnings of NAISDA were around the corner from Glebe Point Road in St Johns Rd, and Elsie, the first women’s refuge in Sydney, nearby in Westmoreland St.
A couple of blocks back, predating all of these places was Tranby in Mansfield Street. The 1964 photo of Charles Perkins that I refer to on his way to, or from, Tranby is here. He was one of 29 students who boarded a bus on 12 February 1965 outside the ‘Great Hall’ of Sydney University, just across Victoria Park from the beginning of Glebe Point Road. Their travels through western NSW were to become known as the Freedom Ride (here and here) and another photo of Perkins has come to epitomise that protest. The quote from Ann Curthoys’ diary is from Freedom ride: a freedom rider remembers, Allen & Unwin, 2002 p71 but you can see her actual diaries here. What an extraordinary resource!
Legacies are always nuanced, and I asked Wendy, Diane and Julie about the excitements and revelations of the movements of the 1960s and ‘70s, and about what those times mean to us today. Diane sees tangible improvements in how gay and lesbian people are treated, and in their visibility and opportunities. Julie sees some progress for women – for example, in access to abortion – but on a general level is disappointed that there hasn’t been more progress. Wendy acknowledges that there’s been change, but also feels that some of the progress that was made then has gone backwards. Both Julie and Wendy concluded on a sombre note. Julie: ‘Sometimes we have too much faith in some essential human goodness that maybe isn’t always there.’ And Wendy: ‘I think you do have to maintain hope, but optimism is harder.’
Interviewees for episode 5: my thanks to you all
Lucy Taksa, Professor of Management, Deakin University Business School
John Richardson, Sydney architect
Diane Minnis, ‘78er
Wendy Bacon, https://www.wendybacon.com/
Julie Gibson, revolutionary, activist, organiser, philosopher, filmmaker, photographer, Glebe resident for 30 years. Bodysurfer, student, computer programmer, mother, teacher, friend, kayaker, walker, ping pong player, cyclist, technical writer. Farmer and Landcare activist.
Acknowledgements
Bronwyn Mehan: Spineless Wonders
Martin Gallagher: Echidna Audio: sound design
Peter Barley: special voices
Zoe Hercus: publicity
Bettina Kaiser: artwork
Frequency of stage-coaches and steam boats from Maclehose, J. Picture of Sydney and Strangers’ Guide in New South Wales for 1839. John Ferguson, Sydney in association with The Royal Australian Historical Society, facsimile edition 1977, p139.
Description of the railway viaduct from The beginning of the Railway Era in Australia. Royal Australian Historical Society Journal 1955 Vol. 41, Part 4, p.272.
Information on the WWF draws on Wharfies – The history of the Waterside Workers’ Federation. Margo Beasley, Halstead Press, 1996.
Information on the boundary markers from the 1830s: https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/sydneys_boundary_markers
Information on the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association from Heather Goodall and Allison Cadzow. Rivers and resilience: Aboriginal people on Sydney’s Georges River. UNSW Press, 2009, p144.
Feminist journals in the National Library of Australia: Womanspeak and Mabel.
A tribute to Professor Hanna Neumann.
Kathy Prokhovnik 